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NOT YOUR USUAL SUSPECTS

A group blog featuring an international array of killer mystery, suspense, and romantic suspense writers. With premises and story lines different from your run-of-the-mill whodunits, we tend to write outside the box. We blog several times a week on all topics relating to romantic suspense and mystery, our writing, and our readers. We welcome all comments and often have guest bloggers. All our authors can be contacted separately, too, using their own social media links.

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Wednesday, August 23, 2017

BIRTHDAYS AND CHARACTER

by Janis Patterson

Today is August 23. It’s the birthday of two of the most
important people in my life. Unfortunately we all live far apart, so our
celebrations are now confined to postal, electronic and telephonic mediums, but
we have the memories of more exuberant parties in the past. Happy Birthday, my
dear ones.

Which – since I am first and foremost a writer all the way
down to my bones – started me thinking about how birthdays affect character. It
is a fact that everyone has a birthday. It’s a given of being a human being,
along with the fact that someday everyone will die. However, everything else is
different for every person, and it is those differences that give your
character depth and personality.

Does the character even know his birthday? Did he have
fantastic parties with mountains of presents, bounce houses and pony rides? A
family dinner with a few presents and a homemade cake? Just a cupcake and a
song? Or no celebration at all? Whatever the character had affects what he is
presently and what he regards as normal, for good or bad.

No, you don’t have to put the history of his birthdays in
your story, but that history affects the way he behaves, and you have to know
it, just as you know his history of school and everything else in his prior
life. Was he a straight A student or a sullen dropout? Did he date a lot, or
not at all? Did he have an allowance or work for pocket money or did he have to
work to support the family? All these affect what he (or she) is now.

I repeat, none of these facts have to appear in your story.
The character doesn’t have to sit and remember on the page how Ella Sue turned
him down when he asked her to senior prom, engendering in him a life-long
hatred of blondes who wear glasses. On the other hand, he can – just remember it’s
your story and you must write it the way that is best for that story. I’m just
saying everything that happened to your character in all of his life before the
story starts makes him the person that he is, and you must know it. Our past
affects our present. Our past makes us what we are now, and that goes for
fictional characters too.

6 comments:

It's so true that we need to do a bio for our main characters, many details of which will not show up in the actual writing. For a character to be realistic, he/she must first become real for the writer.

Janis, knowing your characters bios is much like knowing facts about your setting. You put much more work and time into researching what isn't said, so that what is said will read as authentic. A convoluted way of saying I agree with you!

Great post! I always have to know my main characters' birthdays and how it affects them. In my forthcoming historical novel, Playing by Heart, my main character's birthday determined part of her name. Emilia Teresa gets her middle name from St. Teresa, whose feast day was two days before Emilia's birth.